Media

As newspapers scale down their operations to cope with decreasing circulation, one of the first things to suffer has been the most costly, time-intensive endeavor in journalism: investigative reporting. “It is the deep-dive stuff and the aggressive follow-up that is most challenged in the budget process,” says Paul Steiger, former editor of the Wall Street Journal. Steiger hopes to help fill in the gaps left by scaled-down papers with a new non-profit called Pro Publica.

Radiohead, one of the most successful rock bands of the last ten years, has decided to self-release its latest album "In Rainbows" and allow fans to pay whatever the choose for the right to download it.

The magazine rack at your local bookstore is crowded with engaging titles about every imaginable subject. But the thought of another monthly or weekly magazine arriving in the mail, and ending up in a stack along with the other half-read or unread magazines, newspapers and books, might prevent you from signing up for a subscription. But what if the $20 subscription fee went directly to one of your favorite non-profits?

How big is too big? For many people, that is the question regarding Clear Channel Communications, which owns over 1,200 radio stations in the United States and has been involved in a series of anti-trust lawsuits since the early 2000s. In 2005, Clear Channel earned $936 million, much of it from the spinoff of its concert-management unit and the public sale of a stake in its billboard division. And though Clear Channel radio division is beginning to feel the challenge of satellite radio, the company’s influence on what music the public listens to is being felt across the country.